Images of Bodily Transformation

In the beginning, according to Ovid, there was Chaos. All existence was merely "a shapeless uncoordinated mass, nothing but a weight of lifeless matter, whose ill-assorted elements were indiscriminately heaped together in one place".2 Heat was blended with cold, dry with damp, and hard with soft: everything interfered with everything else. Then a divine power separated the elements and set them in their rightful places, and matter acquired form. The earth was shaped into a ball, and human beings were created. Then, almost immediately, the trouble began, starting with an attack by giants on the kingdom of the gods. The rest of Ovid's work is a compilation of tales of transformation and shapeshifting, beginning with the original werewolf story, in which Lykaon angers Zeus and is punished by being changed into a wolf.